Paid in Full

The last seats in Milan's La Scala opera house sold for $40 twenty minutes before curtain time last week. All of Milan society was there, in rustling silks, jewels and white ties; high above the first red-brocaded boxes sat elderly retired musicians in shiny, worn evening clothes. In all, 3,500 had jammed in to welcome their favorite son back to Milan.

When Maestro Toscanini scooted onstage, music-lovers in the peanut galleries leaned over the rails to hiss the buzz-buzz in the parquet into silence. Then, in the still, warm, muggy air (two women in the crowded audience fainted), they listened for three hours to the romantic music of Poet-Musician Arrigo Boito, whom all Milan was honoring on the 30th anniversary of his death.

The audience had, in fact, come to honor both the living and the dead. The final lush chords of Boito's music (from his operas Mefistofele and Nerone) were drowned by applause. But when 81-year-old Conductor Toscanini hopped spryly down from the podium, the whole house was on its feet screaming "viva il maestro;" cried one voice, "Non c'e che lui" (he's in a class by himself). For 19 minutes the bedlam continued; the soloists (two of whom, Soprano Herva Nelli and Baritone Frank Guarrera, Metropolitan audition winner, had been brought from the U.S. by Toscanini) took 32 curtain calls. The maestro himself took twelve, at first grinning shyly, then broadly.

Debt of Honor. For the little maestro, it was far more than a personal triumph: he had also satisfied a debt of honor that had nagged him for 30 years. As a young man he had conducted Boito's pompously romantic opera, Mefistofele. Their friendship had ripened while Boito was busy winning greater fame as the librettist of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff--and plugging away for years at another opera of his own, Nerone.

Toscanini and Boito had wept together at the first piano reading of Nerone. But when Boito orchestrated it, Toscanini felt the orchestration faulty, and said so. They quarreled. Years later, Toscanini heard that Boito was dying in an obscure clinic in Milan; he arrived too late to see him alive. Toscanini spent two years finishing the orchestration of Nerone and gave its first performance at La Scala in 1924. But, say Toscanini's friends, he has always felt that he had failed his onetime comrade.

Candles at the Altar. Arrigo Boito, excitable and fiercely mustachioed, was the son of an Italian painter of miniatures who abandoned his family soon after Ar-rigo's birth. His mother, a Polish countess, set him studying to become a musician. At 19, his cantata Le Sorelle d'Italia won him a traveling scholarship. On his way home from Paris he traveled through Poland and Germany and picked up some heretical ideas that soon got him in hot water at home. Sample: he wrote a poem calling for a composer who could restore the glory of Italian music, "that altar, soiled like the wall of a brothel." Verdi, the most popular composer of the day, snapped: "If I am among those who, as Boito says, have sullied the altar, let him clean it, and I shall be the first to ... light a candle in his honor."

But even Verdi finally fell before the power of Boito's poetry and his superb dramatic skill. Said Verdi, after completing Otello at 73: "If I were 30 years younger, I should like to begin a new opera tomorrow--on the condition that Boito provided the libretto." Boito did, and the result (with Shakespeare's help) was Falstaff, one of the greatest triumphs of both words & music of them all.

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